doreen, have you ever had a splinter?
I think with these added details, the father seems pretty blameless, and the greater harm was done to the child by taking him away from his family for a minor incident.
Of course I have - but I’ve never needed to try a utility knife to remove one. And I’ve never decided on Thursday morning that my child needed to see a doctor for an injury (as this father apparently did) but decided that it could wait a few days.
Put yourself in the position of the hospital staff, and assume that you’re told the information in the later article. Some woman brings a kid in Thursday night and says that the kid was fooling around with a BB gun Wednesday night and the father was planning to bring the kid to the doctor Saturday , but the kid asked her boyfriend to remove it Thursday night and he tried to do so unsuccessfully so she brought the kid to the ER. You’d really think that sounded like normal everyday behavior, no reason for alarm or suspicion? Remembering that if something else happens to the kid, people are going to be asking why you didn’t report it, especially if the roommate is involved again. And that’s assuming that the hospital wasn’t required to report the injury as a gunshot wound- some states require that all gunshot wounds be reported to the police and BB guns might be included.
Which is not to say that the kid would have been in danger if he went home from the hospital with his father, but I can see why the hospital would make a report and then CPS/police have to investigate.And to be honest, the whole thing probably would have gone differently if the father had taken the kid to the doctor on Thursday rather than deciding to wait until Saturday.
What you said was “neglect. Which generally includes a lot of issues , such as not sending a child to school, delays in obtaining appropriate medical care, failing to prevent a child from gaining access to various items dangerous to a child of that age/maturity (medications, power tools , open five gallon buckets with a few inches of liquid in them).” A 12-year-old that is not “mature” enough to handle a BB gun (standard issue to every six-year-old boy back in the day) certainly ought not be trusted with a circular saw or welding equipment, which are far more likely to do real damage. Do you think he can’t pick up a tool and plug it in? Clearly a locked cabinet is in order from your description, as what else could deny a 12-year-old access?
The guy didn’t take the kid to the doctor because he had an obviously superficial flesh wound. His mistake was in not removing the BB right away and allowing the wound to close. Not being a parent, he was unaware of today’s culture of hysteria and thought that the perfectly healthy 12-year-old would suffer no significant problems as a result of a delay in removing the tiny item. Too bad he only considered the medical effects and failed to predict that the boy would be tossed in foster care, still physically healthy.
I sure have. For both wood and metal ones. Also an ingrown toenail. I’m capable of taking exactly the same precautions against infection in such a minor ‘surgery’ that a surgeon would (and of getting myself in promptly for an antibiotic scrip if said precautions had failed, which they didn’t), and of bandaging up a little cut afterward.
Seriously, this is only a modest step above cooking in the taking-care-of-yourself department. It might be roughly equal with oil changes, depending on one’s particular aptitudes.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest that he wasn’t right.
The original report said the kid shot himself in the head, when he actually caught an ill-timed ricochet. It said the BB was in his skull, when it was actually just under the skin in his scalp. It said his father tried to remove it with a utility knife, when it later turns out his father didn’t try to remove it at all, and the guy who did used a scalpel, gloves and sterilizing alcohol.
It looks like they removed the child without any cause and then tried to cover it up by making the whole incident sound much worse than it was.
I agree. This is much ado about nothing, based on the information we have here.
If you are not used to the culture of not running to the doctor every three days, what happened here may seem bizarre and possibly criminal. But, in a lot of households, it’s normal.
Around here, if you smash your finger with a hammer, and the blood pools badly under your nail, you take a tiny drill bit and pop a hole in the nail and drain it. If you have a giant splinter (or a really oogy pimple) you lance it with a pin. If you trip and fall and hurt your foot or wrist, really badly, and it really hurts, you see how it is the morning, assess the swelling, and probably skip the doctor unless you cannot put any weight on it (like, it collapses, not that it just hurts really bad.) If you slice your skin open really bad, you wrap and wait an hour or two before checking the bleeding rate and heading in for stitches. Hell, some people glue their own bad cuts (that’s a little beyond me, though).
Thousands and thousands of people live that way, and I’d bet their rates of sickness and death are about the same as those who run to the ER all the time. But their bills are less 
Well I laughed…
And this is why parents live in terror of CPS. Doesn’t matter how much good they do–they only gotta blow it once in a thousand cases before people see them as a threat to their homes and not an organization looking out for the welfare of children.
It sounds like this is a family on the edge financially, and all dependent upon the Father’s job.
I’m lucky enough to have a pediatric practice on my side where children are seen on Sat and Sun mornings, as well as throughout the week. Folks who only have 3-4 days per week access have to make really hard decisions about when to wait and when to head to the ER.
For those of you not in the USA I’ll explain. Even for those of us lucky enough to have insurance, it is generally required that anything your regular Doctor can handle has to be brought to his/her office. If you make the judgement call to head to the ER, and it turns out to have been unnecessary, then the insurance company will deny the claim. In some cases, unless you are admitted overnight (which you don’t even get for most surgeries) you won’t be reimbursed. So yeah, we make some dodgy calls when money is severely tight.
But I agree with Steryn too. My Granfather had a bad ingrown toenail. His Doctor said they could dig it out, and most likely it wouldn’t grow back again for a couple of years, when they would just do the same again. Papa went home, heated up his soldering iron, and burned away the flesh that was growing over the nail. Hurt for a week or so, but never bothered him again after that.
I’m not advocating that approach, and I certainly would never take a knife to Celtling, but I totally get and respect the mentality. We shouldn’t have to see it that way, but these are the cards some folks have been dealt.
A child died a few years ago in Washington DC of an abscessed tooth. The Mother had no dental insurance, no money, and called as many dentists as she could from a phone booth (because she had no phone,) until she ran out of quarters, but nobody would help. The ER just sent them away - dental problem, not medical.
If she had tried to pull the tooth herself, I am certain that the media reports would have been all “ZOMG, Mother kills son by self-treating infected tooth” instead of the more appropriate “Child dies from societal neglect.”
I guess my point is, shame on us, not on them. Clearly this Dad didn’t feel safe taking a day off of work to get his son medical care; or was concerned about the financial impact of the missed hours plus medical bills. Horrifying.
There is almost always “more to the story” with these types of articles. The first reports make it sound like jackbooted thugs marched in and danced “Springtime for Hitler” all over rights, common sense and family values… but then, bit by bit, the rest of the story comes out and their actions were at most a bit unfeeling, if that.
But nobody remembers the later stories, just the outrageous first version.
But this one seems to be going in the opposite direction. At first the story was the dad had let junior shoot himself in the head and then tried to pull it out of his skull with an exacto knife. Taking the kid away seemed almost reasonable.
But the story now seems that the kid didn’t shoot himself in the head, it was never in his skull, dad didn’t try to take it out at all, and the person who did used gloves, a scalpel, and alcohol. Now taking the kid away seems like a crazy over-reaction.
Taking the kid does not seem reasonable in either case, IMHO, but yes, the additional facts (as reported) definitely don’t make it more reasonable at all.
There are a lot of people who accept as a given the propriety of the actions of those with power and figure backwards from there, concocting justifications and alternate scenarios when the truth seems unacceptable.